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The most and least attractive accents in the British Isles revealed

11 Dec 2014

The Southern Irish, Received Pronunciation and Welsh accents have been voted the most attractive in the the British Isles, according to a new survey.

YouGov, a global market research company, asked 2018 adults across England, Scotland, Wales, Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland whether they think 12 of the main dialects in the region are attractive or not.

The results were based on the difference between the percentages who liked the accent and those who didn't. Popular accents had high scores, whereas the least popular ones had scores below zero.

Southern Irish was found to be the most attractive accent with a score of 42, followed by Received Pronunciation (the accent of standard English) at 31 and Welsh at 20.

The dialect that was voted least pleasing to the ear is the Birmingham or 'Brummie' accent which scored -53 (the difference between the percentage who liked the accent and those who didn't).

Liverpool's Scouse accent was second least popular with an average score of - 33, followed by Manchester's Mancunian accent at -31.

Researchers also found that people tend to prefer their own dialect, where Londoners gave the cockney accent a -16 net score, while overall it scored -30. In Scotland, Glaswegian received a net result of 7, but was -29 among Britain as a whole.

There are roughly as many accents in the British Isles as there are in the whole of North America, including Canada, Bermuda and Native American dialects.

According to YouGov, there is roughly one accent for every 1.3million people living in the British Isles.

"Britain is highly peculiar in its linguistic variation, and the cultural contours associated with these differences make a small country feel large," said the researchers.